text stringlengths 0 1.49k |
|---|
**Brian Ketelsen:** Fully distributed? Now that's a big difference. What are the dynamics like on a fully distributed team, with Go? How does that change things for you? |
**Chase Adams:** It's really interesting... I've been fully distributed myself for -- my two-year anniversary at Walmart was middle of July this year, so I've been working on distributed teams not for a very long time, considering there are some people who've been working on them for over a decade, but one of the inter... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** What tools do you use for distributed communication? Are you deeply in [Slack](https://slack.com/), or email, or some other thing? |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, Slack is probably one of the heavier tools that we use for communication. Since we're writing code, GitHub is a pretty significant place where we spend communicating... And I think the GitHub Enterprise that we're using now has a lot of the newer features for reviews and doing approvals, and just... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[12:05\] So have you found ways to do it better than you normally would if you weren't making an effort? |
**Chase Adams:** Yes. For me, I usually ask other people before I make a comment on something, especially if I think that it might potentially come across in a bad way. I think just talking to someone who has context around what you're talking about, but isn't the person that you're addressing immediately, they're able... |
Before joining this team, I worked pretty heavily on CI/CD, and I had my manager -- a lot of times I would talk to him about it, and we had a really good relationship to where I felt like I could be open with him about, you know, if I was seeing something that might not come across right... Or bounce those kinds of thi... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So let's talk a little bit about Go at Walmart. Is it pretty much isolated to your current team, or do you know of other teams within Walmart and Walmart Labs that are at least experimenting with Go, or have it in production already? |
**Chase Adams:** I know my team is the only team that I'm aware of that has Go in production. We all love Go, so we're encouraging other people to use it for things that might fit their use case. Anytime that we're in an office, we try and do some kind of introduction to Go, just so people can kind of get a taste for i... |
For me, before I joined this team working on CI/CD, I owned a [Jenkins](https://jenkins.io/) instance that had 60 agents, 60 different nodes, and we had to share those nodes for a pretty tremendous amount of the customer experience team, which is the team that uses Node.js pretty heavily to run integration tests. We wa... |
But we built a tool in Go that would basically switch those agents in and out based on capacity... Because neither of us wrote Java, neither of us cared to write Java; it was a really easy thing to do. And just building those kinds of tools at Walmart, and really any company; I think is a great way to show that it's a ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** And your first taste is free. |
**Chase Adams:** That's right, always free. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** That's really cool. I think internal evangelism is easier than external evangelism. When you can show the awesome ROI on a project and other people want to look as cool as you - it's easier to sell something like that. |
**Chase Adams:** I think that's true, and I think the other big piece of it for me coming into Go was just being able to see someone use the Go tools that are, you know, first-class citizens to Go, that you don't get with other languages... Just to see how easy it is to write Go and to make sure that your Go is gonna w... |
\[16:16\] Having written a lot of Node.js previously, setting up testing for JavaScript is a nightmare, and when you can show those kinds of things to people, just how easy it is to set up projects and how Go the language made the developer an important part of the story, to me that's a really convincing thing to be ab... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** We should put a sign over the stove in the kitchen - "If the developer is happy, everybody is happy." |
**Chase Adams:** That's right. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So you've mentioned CI/CD several times... Is this a passion of yours, or is that something that you enjoy doing consistently? |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, I love CI/CD. My story at Walmart - I joined to work on React components, because... You know, when you think about Walmart and having these separate apps that need to consume similar data and be able to not have so much code that's just _copy pasta_ - that was a really big selling point. And if ... |
When I joined this team, we didn't have any tests, there was a huge drift across all of the developer tools that we were using, so... You know, Webpack was a different version, ESLint (if it was even there) was a different version, so... When I came in, even though I was gonna work on React components, I wanted to tigh... |
It kind of started out that way, where I just wanted to make everything a little nicer, and I ended up owning a Jenkins instance around October 2015. In December they spun up a new organ, asked if I was interested in CI/CD, and starting at getting these Electrode components to where everything was just flowing really n... |
To me, if you can make it so that your code is mostly something that you feel like you can have some kind of assurance about and be able to get it from the developer to production in a way that's not too convoluted, those kind of things for me... Yeah, they just made me so excited, and I think it really comes out of th... |
You're gonna have politics wherever you work, you're gonna have some crappy things wherever you work, and if you have really good things and if you're not having to deal with bureaucracy, or if you don't even know if your app is gonna work when you push that in production - those are bad things... So making it so that ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[20:06\] Yeah, for me CI is all about sleep. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I wanted to clarify that [CI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration) is continuous integration and [CD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery) is continued development? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Continuous delivery. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Continuous delivery. |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, the D is interchangeable for some people. It's delivery or deployment. I think delivery is the best word to use. There is also some contention about what delivery is and what deployment is, but for the most part it's that idea of CI is just making sure that your code is in a good state to when yo... |
Then the CD is just being able to deploy it from environment to environment in such a way that if all the integration tests pass and all the different (what we call) "gates" work, then your code is gonna be able to go to production without a lot of extra finagling of environments. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Is there anything about Go -- I mean, since you're into this, I'm sure you've done it in environments other than with Go... Is there anything about Go that makes CI especially easier, or more difficult, or any aspect of the CI/CD process? |
**Chase Adams:** For CI I think just Go existing in the first place - because Docker came out of Go and Docker to me has kind of revolutionized CI - just that alone is probably one of the best things to come out of Go with CI... Because you can imagine, if you have a place like Walmart, where everyone has their own lit... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So how does your CD pipeline work at Walmart? Do you have continuous delivery for a lot of components? |
**Chase Adams:** So for the Electrode land, which was the React stuff, that is the case. For us, with my team, we're still kind of working it out, because we do have some constraints that I think those, you know, just spinning up an app and sending it out to the world don't necessarily have. But for us, most of what we... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I don't, either. I think you've dodged the question. |
**Chase Adams:** I think probably. So we're still working on our CD story for my team. I spent a whole year working on CI/CD for the React components and the React applications, so... Spending a whole year and being fully dedicated to that project, we definitely got CI/CD going for that group, and that's a pretty large... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Changing the wheels on the bus while it's moving fast? |
**Chase Adams:** \[24:03\] Yeah, I like to use the -- I don't know if you remember that [commercial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8), but it was like "We like to build airplanes... In the air." It's that same thing. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[laughs\] I haven't seen that one, but I've had that job before, so I empathize. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I don't know why I just thought of this, but do you guys remember... There was the [commercial with Jean-Claude Van Damme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10) and he was doing the split across the two semis, and then there was like the parody that came out and it was [Chuck Norris doing a ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I haven't seen that, but it sounds hilarious. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I have no idea why that just popped in my head, but that's where it went. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, very on topic. Thank you, Erik, for that. |
**Chase Adams:** I think airplanes make me think of that commercial as well, because that was -- you don't expect it, you don't see it coming, because it's just Chuck Norris' face, and then it zooms out, and then you see the airplanes on either side and he's doing a split over it... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Now we're gonna have to link those in the show notes... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, it's gonna have to happen. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, I haven't seen it, so... I need to see it. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** So one of the things that we talked about earlier when we were planning this show is mentoring, which is something that Erik and I have been talking about quite a bit lately. You mentioned that you wanted to talk about mentoring. What are your thoughts on being a mentor or being mentored? Have you h... |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, absolutely. I think my thought on it is just everyone should be a mentor and everyone should have a mentor. There's just no reason not to. |
I used to work at Zappos, and this was -- it feels like a lifetime ago now... I think it was probably only four years, three years ago (who knows). But one of the things that I was really interested in when I was at Zappos was making sure that everyone had the opportunity to grow in the places that they felt like they ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.